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The Indiana Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments next week for a case involving a longstanding dispute between a pair of former Munster school administrators and the state over alleged overpayments to the two men.
The court’s hearing is scheduled Dec. 8, beginning at 1 p.m., at the Court of Appeals Courtroom.
According to court records, the appeal concerns events that occurred from 1999 to 2014 when William Pfister was the superintendent and Richard Sopko was the assistant superintendent for the School Town of Munster.
In 2016, the Indiana State Board of Accounts issued a report that while Pfister and Sopko were officers, they received nearly $850,000 more than their contracts allowed in violation of the SBOA’s uniform compliance guidelines.
Most of the alleged overpayments were related to their annuities.
Former School Town of Munster superintendents Pfister and Sopko were sued by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office in 2017 after a SBOA report revealed a total of $841,398.03 in allegedly misappropriated overpayments. The results of an audit for the time between July 1, 1999 and June 30, 2014 revealed $463,922.75 in alleged overpayments to Pfister during his time as superintendent and $377,475.28 to Sopko during his tenure as assistant superintendent and superintendent.
The funds in question included annuity payments, cash bonuses, investment allotments, salaries and stipends and community relations fringe benefits. The audit also found the superintendents were liable for costs incurred by the State Board of Accounts.
The State of Indiana, through the Attorney General’s Office, filed a complaint to recover public funds under Indiana Code section 5-11-5-1(a) against Pfister, Sopko and several companies that had issued insurance policies and bonds covering their conduct, with the state alleging that Pfister and Sopko had engaged in malfeasance, misfeasance, and/or nonfeasance.
However, the Lake Circuit Court ruled in favor of the former school officials, as did the Indiana Court of Appeals, which found the state waited too long to pursue its suit against the men.
Over the next seven years, the trial issued a series of summary judgment orders in favor of Pfister, Sopko, and the companies that resolved this case, according to the Indiana Court of Appeals.
The state is appealing the rulings.
The case is State of Indiana v. William J. Pfister, et al., 25A-PL-614.
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